


I want to go down before I feel my heart

by tahariel



Series: Backseat 'verse [17]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Dom/sub, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 09:39:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tahariel/pseuds/tahariel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first fight always sets the tone for every fight that comes after. Charles knows this, but it doesn't make standing up to his Dominant any easier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I want to go down before I feel my heart

**Author's Note:**

> With especial thanks to euphorbic, ionaonie and thisissirius for looking over this for me when I was spending too long making :S faces at my screen.

Charles has felt restless and uncertain all day, ever since his conversation with Hank. The real problem is that while he’s anxious, he’s not a coward; the thought of maybe fighting with Erik makes a little knot of nausea gather in his belly, lingering and impossible to ignore, but he can’t just _not_ say anything. It gnaws at him all through the train ride home, through dinner, Erik glancing up at him from time to time as though waiting for him to speak. When Charles gets up to gather the detritus together he’s awkward and ungainly in a way that only adds to his unease, and he can feel Erik noticing.

Instead of going to the study or the living area while Charles washes the dishes, tonight Erik stays sat at the kitchen island, toying with his empty beer bottle and watching without comment. He’s day-rumpled and tired around the edges, his shirt rolled up to his elbows and collar creased around his neck where he’s spent all day tugging and dragging at his tie, his hair tousled out of its usual order by frustrated fingers. Charles puts down the last pan a little too loudly, metal clanking against the draining board, and Erik glances up at him, quiet and steady. “Are you ready to talk about it?” There is a quieter ring of glass on granite as he sets the bottle back down on the counter. “Whatever it is, you’ve been brooding on it for the past fortnight. Might as well spit it out.”

“Could we go sit down?”

Erik frowns, and thinks a wordless question at Charles, concerned. “It is serious, then, if it’s not for discussion in the kitchen.”

“It’s not - um, just, let’s go sit,” Charles says, and lets Erik lead the way to the couch, but when he goes to kneel Erik’s fingers pinch tight around his elbow and hold him hovering halfway down, his Dominant’s expression serious. “Sit beside me,” Erik says, and pushes gently until Charles sits on the other end of the couch, awkwardly upright and separate from Erik in a way he hasn’t been, before.

The living room ought to be a neutral area, and it’s clearly what Erik intended, but the problem is that they’ve had sex pretty much everywhere. Charles tries not to think about the coffee table and the couch, the floor in front of it and the armchair sat kitty-corner to them, but it’s difficult to reconcile that playtime with the way Erik is sat stiff and upright, the very image of proper posture - the formality of it betrays his discomfort, even if he doesn’t let it affect his tone of voice.

“One of the first things I said to you, that first day,” Erik says, letting go of Charles’ arm and drawing his hand back to his end of the couch, “was that I want you to talk freely with me. I’m not going to punish you for speaking your mind. So if there’s something bothering you - I hope you haven’t been holding back because you thought I’d be angry.”

It feels very odd to be like this, on the couch and not alone or sprawled out with Erik, curled close together, or kneeling at his feet, where Charles feels most secure - everything right and clear in the world, Erik in charge and Charles content to let him be. He shakes his head, tangling his fingers together in his lap. “No, that’s not - it’s not that. It’s just - well, it’s going to be a difficult conversation, and I was avoiding it.”

Erik frowns. He’s sifting through a mass of possibilities, considering each potential issue in turn and rejecting them just as easily. There are some things in there Charles hadn’t known Erik was worried about, minor ones like Charles not being registered yet to drive Erik’s car - which is fine, he’s not bothered about that, though Erik seems to think he might be - and larger ones, like the late nights he’s had to put in lately, which have left Erik feeling he might be neglecting Charles. “What is it, Charles?” he asks instead, out loud, and just as with his voice none of that shows on his face; instead he is impassive, as neutral as possible without being emotionless.

“It’s about Hank’s project,” Charles starts slowly, and the frown turns into a scowl.

“No.”

Erik’s voice is emphatic, and Charles has to swallow down a lump of obedience on his throat before he can continue, deliberately stilling his hands in his lap. “It’s important to me. Hank needs my help if the project is to go anywhere, there’s simply nobody else who can - ”

“Risk their unique and irreplaceable brain for science?” His Dom’s face is one big thundercloud even if he is keeping voice calm, and his insides reflect his outsides, all the other worries pushed aside in favour of this one storm, lightning flashes of possible arguments flashing through his mind along with rolls of angry thunder.

Erik leans forward, all the lines in his body taut and tense with compressed emotion. “Charles, we talked about this. I’m not happy with you just letting Hank experiment on you, even if it is ‘for science’. I don’t give a shit about science if it might mean you get hurt, and you’re not going to convince me that Hank knows exactly what he’s doing, or it wouldn’t be called an experiment.”

Charles’ fingers curl together into one tight lump, knuckles painfully white.

“That’s the thing though, we didn’t talk about it.” There’s a brief taste of blood where he’s bitten down on a previous cut in his lip, coppery and oversweet. “Yes, I messed up by not telling you about it - the project had been on hold for a while before we bonded and before the last round of testing, so I forgot about it. And I was wrong to forget about the appointment and make you worry, and we - you punished me for that, and I accepted the punishment and that I was in the wrong, and that’s all fine. Except that we didn’t talk about it, and it matters to me that I do this. It’s not just for Hank, we’re learning valuable things about how telepathy works through testing me and trying to integrate it with technology.”

Erik folds his arms across his chest, jaw set and square. “Let someone else play lab rat.”

“There is no-one else. There aren’t many telepaths to begin with, and very few as strong and as trained as I am. That I even know Emma outside of both being telepaths is statistically so unlikely as to be vanishingly unlikely. And really that’s still the reason I know her. There’s only me.” Charles leans forward, ducking his head a little lower in case showing his submission will help Erik feel more comfortable, in case it will make a difference. “I’m not just letting him do whatever, Erik. We’re using proper scientific process and protocol. At the moment we’re really just recording my output, we’re not interfering in my brainwaves at all.”

The couch springs creak as Erik leans back, lifting a hand to rub along his face, finger and thumb pinching into the inner corners of his eyes and rubbing at the grit there. He’s all long lean limbs and exhaustion, and Charles feels sorry to put this on him when he’s tired - the late nights have been catching up with Erik recently, the overlap of two big projects with short deadlines catching him in the middle and burning his candle at both ends - but Charles’ work is important, too. They’re supposed to be equals.

“You can come and see all the equipment if you want,” he offers, and reaches out to put his hand on Erik’s knee, is reassured when it’s not rebuffed. “The door to the shielded room is broken, actually, maybe you could fix it for us? It’ll take ages for maintenance to get around to it and I’m always worried we might get stuck in there. It’s pretty heavy.”

“I’m not happy about this,” Erik says, taking his hand away from his face and fixing Charles with his gaze, sharp and grey despite the slight droop of his lids, the aftertaste of sleep deprivation to his thoughts. “Charles, I - look. I’m not trying to control your work. I’m your Dominant, not your - you belong to me, but I’m not your owner. I belong to you, too. This is a voluntary dictatorship. But I’m not happy about you risking yourself like this for Hank’s project, which since I know his doctorate is underway on energy mutations is not going to affect his degree. And even if it did it wouldn’t be fair, putting this obligation on you. I don’t want you risking yourself for this. No.”

“Erik - ”

“No! I said no,” and Erik jumps to his feet, fists clenching at his sides - Charles gets a flash of hospital gowns, a signed form, the stink of antiseptic and sickly sweet rot. After it, underlying everything, is a drawn, pallid face, one he doesn’t recognise but that comes with a thick weight of love and regret in Erik’s mind that strikes Charles dumb for a moment with its intensity. “No, Charles.” Erik shakes his head, sweeping a hand emphatically through the air.

For a moment he seems about to say something further, lips parting as he hesitates, but then he spins on his heel and just - leaves. It’s not hurried, but instead it’s controlled, taut and stiff-limbed in a way he doesn’t usually carry himself, as though every muscle is tensed and rigid with anger. Erik strides across the apartment to the hall closet, grabs his jacket from the hook on the inside of the door and, with a wordless twist of his mind on the doorhandle to open it he leaves, shutting it behind himself firmly, with a ring of finality. His mind shuts down against Charles, a stinging backlash that shuts him out even though there’s old pain flaring in there that Charles has not yet got a good look at.

Charles sits there in stunned silence, mouth agape, surprised beyond immediate upset. His Dom has always been so calm, so controlled - even when Charles could tell there were deep emotions running through Erik, that he is a river with strong undercurrents, Erik has always swum before. This time it seems the undertow has caught him - and Charles by extension.

His breath is shaky in his chest, uneven, his diaphragm trembling painfully with its indecision over inhaling or exhaling.

Something set Erik off, that’s clear. Charles forces himself to consider it as calmly as possible, but it hurts, to have been rejected so thoroughly even when he told Erik how important it was to him. His brows draw together at the first stirrings of anger at Erik’s behaviour. It’s not fair, not when Charles was willing to offer concessions; it rankles, and there’s an upswell of rebelliousness he fights back down again, because whatever else he may be Charles is a good submissive, wants nothing more than for Erik to be pleased with him and to call him a good boy. But it rises again, a sensation like heartburn in his belly, like swallowing a hot coal. Charles is a good boy, but Erik is supposed to make him want to be good.

When his jaw clenches his teeth make an unpleasant grinding sound before he forces himself to relax.

He thinks about reaching out to find where Erik has got to, but decides against it, refuses to concede. Instead he gets up from his seat on shaky legs and goes to take a shower, washes himself with brusque strokes quite unlike his usual overindulgence, soap and shampoo almost an afterthought; in a fit of good sense he curls up in bed early with a book instead of punishing his students by marking while angry, but he barely reads a word.

It’s hard not to wallow in self-pity after this, their first real - can he call it a fight, Charles wonders, when there was no real argument? Being mad at Erik makes him feel like he’s standing in a tremor zone, forever waiting for the next rumble of the earth beneath his feet to strip away his balance and leave him tumbling endlessly over unsteady ground. The book dips in his hands, unnoticed, as his fingers rise to fiddle with the metal of his collar for reassurance that doesn’t come.

 

 

 

~*~

 

 

When Erik comes back Charles barely wakes, his mental perimeter widening to accept the other mind back into the apartment. Without conscious thought his telepathy busses up against the familiar being like a dozing cat to ensure it’s all in one piece, before rolling over and going back to sleep. He firmly refuses to wake up when the other speaks to him in a low, intent voice, and ignores him until the dark is quiet again. The mattress dips at his side, and Charles grumbles as he’s moved, does not concede to being pulled close and stays stiff as a board until the other gives up and lies in solitary state on the far side of the bed. Victorious, Charles rolls further away and drags the blankets close around himself, gathering more than his fair share and getting to keep it, too.

 

 

~*~

 

 

He wakes up first in the morning, and the first thing Charles smells is alcohol. When he turns his head to look at the far side of the bed Erik looks rumpled and rather the worse for wear, the lines that were simple exhaustion now deeper and more like creases, his skin papery and dry-looking. For a moment Charles feels sympathy for the hangover Erik is sure to have, solicitous care in the way his hand moves to smooth a fallen lock of hair away from Erik’s broad forehead, but he pauses before his fingertips connect, pulls back his hand as he remembers his resentment at the way Erik had abandoned their - Charles cannot even call it a fight, since it was a civil enough discussion until Erik suddenly lost his rag.

Even if Erik had said no eventually, they might have talked it through to its conclusion, Charles thinks, hurt all over again at being abandoned like his counterargument was of no consequence. So much for Erik wanting him to speak his mind! The sheets drag against his skin as he swings his legs out of bed, pausing for a moment on the edge before getting to his feet. The carpet is cool and soft, feels oddly forbidden - usually he waits for Erik to give him permission to get up. It’s part of their morning ritual, not a rule, but most days it gives him a thrill to think Erik might order him to stay there, decadent and irresponsible, wallowing in pillows and blankets like a captive kept for only one purpose - but today, no. He’s not in the mood to wait for Erik to wake up and find himself in bed with Charles, and try to paper over everything.

Instead Charles gets up and takes his clothes with him so he can get dressed by himself in the kitchen while he waits for his morning tea to brew, sets Erik’s coffee going too while he buttons his own shirt and tugs his cuffs straight. When his fingers brush his collar Charles pauses, a pang running through him that he tries to ignore but can’t.

Even if they’re not fighting, feeling so at odds and unstable, unmoored, is the worst. He wraps his fingers around the skin-warmed metal at his throat and reaches for the kettle with his other hand to pour the water over the teabag. Erik wakes up in the other room as Charles is adding the milk and sugar, a blur of drowsy thought before a sudden sharp jag of pain - he must have tried to sit up - and then a burst of confusion and concern.

“Charles? Where are you?”

“In the kitchen,” Charles replies, and does not turn as he lifts his teacup to his lips to take a sip, ignores the shuffle of footsteps behind him as Erik comes to stand there in yesterday’s boxers, his shadow falling over the countertop beside him as he stares at Charles, puzzlement and a dash of resentment muddling along with the headache throbbing at his temples.

He hands Erik his coffee without comment, keeps his eyes low in the image of perfect submission.

“Charles, look at me,” Erik says, and when Charles obeys his Dom is frowning with a hand pressed against the side of his head, eyes narrow as he looks at Charles. “What is all this?”

“Nothing,” Charles says. “Why, is there a problem with your coffee?”

The moment Erik wakes up enough to put two and two together feels like a lightbulb going on, in the most cliched sense, even as he winces with renewed pain. “You’re angry with me.”

The teacup sets down on the counter with a quiet click of china, and Charles says nothing, though inside he wants nothing more than to forget the whole thing and go back to how things usually are. Except that he really wants to work on the project with Hank, and if he gives in now on their first major argument - he can call it an argument, he decides, or at least a disagreement - then it’ll set the tone for the rest of their lives together, and he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life yielding and yielding and yielding and resenting his submission, when it’s supposed to be a joy.

Erik looks him up and down, taking in his fully clothed body, and his frown deepens. “I see you’re ready for the day already.” The _without me_ is thought so loudly that it doesn’t need to be spoken.

“Yes,” Charles says.

“Go kneel by the door to wait for me,” Erik says eventually, and the clench of his jaw is enough to make Charles want to bend, but he doesn’t. Erik gulps down the rest of his coffee as though somehow that will get rid of Charles’ inconvenient feelings along with Erik’s hangover. “We’ll talk about this later.”

The most aggravating thing about it is that Charles is fairly certain Erik knows he has behaved badly, and is just refusing to admit it. Nonetheless, he goes to the front door, sinking to the floor and letting his hands rest palms-up on his thighs, bows his head, and waits.

When he hears Erik pick up the phone, Charles looks up in time to watch Erik call in sick for him, and opens his mouth to protest only to catch a sharp look from his Dom that stills his words in his throat, like an intangible gag. “Yes, he’ll be fine I’m sure. Probably tomorrow. I’ll let you know.” Erik hangs up and immediately dials again, this time calling his own office, a hand against his own forehead where Charles can feel the pain pounding the loudest. “Hello, yes, this is Lehnsherr. I’m not well today, I can’t come in. Yeah, well, sometimes I do get sick.” He coughs unconvincingly, somewhere between a choke and a growl, and winces at the movement. “Look, I can stay at home and be back in tomorrow or I can come in and throw up everywhere, your choice. That’s what I thought. I’ll call you.” This time he hangs up almost viciously, stabbing at the button with his thumb and tossing the handset onto the couch where it bounces into the cushion on the end.

“Erik, what are you - ” Charles starts, and Erik holds up a hand to silence him, but Charles is determined enough that he ignores the way it makes him feel to continue, “What are you doing? You can’t just call me in sick, I have responsibilities - ”

“I know you think I’m being an asshole,” Erik says, “and maybe I am, but let me take you somewhere first. I’m sure the university won’t collapse without you for one day.”

“What if someone sees me and mentions it at work?”

“Then blame me.”

Charles scowls, and it’s the first time he’s really made that kind of face at Erik, has even wanted to, and it feels awkward, wrong. “Erik, no.”

“Just come,” Erik says, and when he goes for the front door Charles, reluctantly, since the call is now a _fait accompli_ anyway, follows.

It’s very unlike the last time they were in the car together, when he was tipsy and happy and knowing that soon Erik would be laying claim to him again, that Erik wanted him. This is very different, sat stiffly in the seat across from him and looking out the window instead of at his Dom, not curled up with his head at Erik’s hip. He concentrates on maintaining his aloofness instead of caving in just to feel Erik happy with him again. Erik is thinking about how Charles is making this difficult, is thinking about driving, trying to keep from thinking about whatever it is going on under his toughened exterior, his expression carefully blank. He winces every time light reflects off the buildings around them and into the car, looks a little green when someone honks at them to get moving. Charles does not press, in case he finds worse things about himself in there that he doesn’t want to hear.

Intellectually he knows Erik loves him, has felt it enough since their bonding, but right here and now he feels adrift, loosed from the warm embrace of Erik’s domination, of knowing his place in their little hierarchy of two.

They cross the Brooklyn Bridge in silence, the crawl of traffic going into Manhattan much slower than that leaving, and Charles watches the water go past, grey and dark, whitecapped from the wind.

When they finally pull to a stop somewhere in Brooklyn it takes Charles a minute to realise that their destination is out Erik’s window rather than his, and he turns only to find they have pulled up outside a cemetery.

“Come on.” Erik gets out of the car, and though he still feels wary and upset, Charles lets Erik take his arm when he reaches the sidewalk. He walks together with him through the gates, and nods to the warden by the entrance as they go in.

Inside the cemetery is crowded with what looks like tourist groups, but Erik pushes through them and leads Charles out onto one of the green, tree-lined paths, ignoring everyone else there with their cameras and their sunglasses. It’s obvious the two of them aren’t here to sightsee. “It’s been a while since I last came,” Erik says, without looking at Charles. “Too long. My fault really, I’m always too busy, it seems. Which is shit. She deserves better.”

“Your mother?” Charles asks, curiosity getting the better of his determination not to play along. Erik never talks about her, and Charles hasn’t yet dared to take out the photo albums he knows Erik keeps in the study in case Erik doesn’t want him looking at them. Some people are funny about the family they’ve lost. Charles understands it more from an intellectual, telepathic perspective than a personal one, though his mother died - oh, seven years ago now. He never felt the way about her he can feel that Erik does now; Charles and Sharon had both of them been more bemused by one another than loving. And yet Erik is thinking that he forgot to stop to get any flowers for his mother, and feels a deep, pained regret that he hasn’t even done that much.

“Yes,” he says, after a stilted moment, and finally slows his step to match Charles’ instead of forcing his sub to hurry along beside him, the breeze leaving his hair as ruffled as the river had been, windswept and interesting. “Emma paid for her to be buried here. We - I - couldn’t have afforded it on my own.”

They turn off the main tourist route and things immediately get quieter, only a few others wandering around, and those few unobtrusive.

“Is it painful, talking about her?” Charles asks, once they’ve not said anything for a full ten minutes, moving further and further into the cemetery.

Erik nods, winces, grits his teeth. “We’re nearly there,” Erik says instead of answering, and as they go down into a little dell he nudges Charles down the lefthand path, between two trees and into a new area of graves. Charles can hear him counting them off in his mind as they walk through the rows, until they find her.

EDIE ELIZABETA LEHNSHERR, the stone reads, BELOVED BONDMATE AND MOTHER. 1960 - 1994.

Charles doesn’t think she’d been bonded to Mr Frost, but he doesn’t like to ask when Erik is kneeling in front of the stone and gently tugging away the grass where it’s grown a little long in front, tidying away one or two leaves from the neatly mowed space in front of it. It only takes him a few moments but he does it slowly, reverently, like an archaeologist uncovering something old and lost and precious.

“Do you know why I always answer the phone?” Erik says conversationally once he’s sat back to inspect his handiwork, not that there was much that needed doing. “Even at night. It’s not because I’m calling my schoolfriends to gossip about the other kids. I’m terrified someone else I love will have died while I was out of reach and nobody will be able to tell me. I was on a field trip that day and they couldn’t get in touch with the teacher to tell them. She made me go. Said I’d be missing out if I didn’t. So I got back to the school and got off the coach and there was the principal waiting to take me to the hospital.”

If Erik’s face is taut and clean of emotion, his mind is not when he looks up at Charles and says, “They put her on experimental treatment, too. She signed the form. But it only made her sicker. And I can’t do that again.”

With the words comes a wash of understanding, and even if it doesn’t excuse Erik’s behaviour it does at least explain it. “Oh, Erik,” Charles says, heart breaking, and he sinks to his knees to put his arms around Erik’s shoulders, tucking his face into the curve of his neck. “I’m so sorry.”

“So you see,” Erik says, shredding one of the leaves between his fingers, “I’m sorry I walked out last night. But I’m not sorry to say no.”

The breeze rattles the leaves above their heads and Charles shifts, sighs. “But it’s not the same, Erik. I can see where it’s similar, but Hank’s not giving me anything. All the machine is doing is looking at what’s already in my head. We’re not changing it, we’re not adding anything that might make me unwell. You own me,” Charles says, sitting back to look Erik in the eye, “but I own me, too, and I’m not doing this for Hank. I’m doing it for me, and all the other telepaths out there who can benefit from this research. And because I like science. If I wasn’t bonded to you I would be bonded to science. It matters to me.”

Erik scowls, brows drawing together darkly. “You said yourself you’re hoping to work out ways to enhance your telepathy. That sounds a lot like adding things to me.”

“Carefully. In a measured, meticulous and cautious way, yes.” Charles shrugs. “If we can work out how it works then yes, of course, we’ll be looking at amplification as well. You have to understand, there’s a big difference between amplifying something I am naturally sensitive to and in control of - my own telepathy - and medicating a woman who is already sick. This machine is built for me. Medical testing is all about finding what works for the majority, and it wouldn’t have been tailored for your mother the way Cerebro is for me.”

“Cerebro?” Erik asks, and there’s a flash of amusement there even through his frustrated concern and disquietude.

“It’s Hank’s project, he gets to name it.”

Erik’s hand goes back out to the headstone. He traces the letters with his thumb, slowly, one by one, and this time when he thinks of his mother he lets Charles see, her face a series of layers in the way most people remember faces - a mixture of the different times they were seen, young and old, healthy and sunken by disease, the sensation that goes with it an odd blend of a warm caress mixed with the coldness of her hand when Erik had reached out to hold it in the chapel afterward, no longer feeling like flesh, waxy and heavy with the absence of life. “I had this dream once,” Erik says, slow and awkward, as though it’s hard to get the words out, “that I went to see her again, after. I was standing there holding her hand in mine, and she was definitely dead, but then she opened her eyes to look at me. And I wanted her to smile, but there was nothing in there. She was hollowed out, not really a person at all.”

“That’s horrible, I’m so sorry you went through all that,” Charles says, moving closer, “but I promise you that’s not going to happen to me.” He leans his head in against Erik’s, ear to ear, looking at Erik’s hand as it follows the gilding, everywhere he touches left glossy and new, a small exercise of his power turning the gold polished and fresh. “Not because of Cerebro, anyway. When you refuse to talk to me, you forget one thing: I’m not your slave. I’m your submissive. Everything you do to me is with my consent and my participation. And even though I let you control me, I can withdraw that permission whenever I want.”

He can feel the moment Erik bends, like a shift in the tide; there’s an ebbing of anger in favour of regret and resignation before Erik says, “I’m coming to see the equipment. And fixing that door. And you and Hank are going to explain to me what you’re trying to do so I understand it better, some time when I’m not hungover. This is not a yes, it’s a compromise. Okay?”

In his head, deep down, it’s a yes, anyway. Charles can feel it, Erik just hasn’t admitted it to himself yet. Charles can be patient. Erik has shown him that.

“Okay.” Charles reaches for Erik’s hand and pulls it away, lacing their fingers together and resting them on Erik’s thigh. “That’s all I wanted, anyway. I’m pretty sure you can make our equipment better, too.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Erik says, quietly, tightly, like it’s hard for him to say aloud, to acknowledge the possibility here of all places, in front of prior experience.

“You won’t,” Charles says. “Not as long as you’re willing to listen.”

His Dom smiles just a little then, turning his head to kiss Charles’ temple, a warm press of lips. “Bear with me, then.”

“ _If a submissive’s greatest asset is patience, a Dominant’s is forbearance,_ ” Charles quotes, prompting a snort of wry acknowledgement from Erik, and they sit there for a while quietly, until the sun comes out and Charles starts to worry about sunburn.

 

 


End file.
